


and whatever walked there

by cygnes



Category: Ex Machina (2015)
Genre: Gen, Haunting, robot ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 00:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6172393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The house talks to Caleb. With a little help, he finds out why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and whatever walked there

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> Originally posted [here](http://manzanas-amargas.tumblr.com/post/138647485800/prompt-ex-machina-house-haunted-by-dead-robots) on my tumblr, for the prompt "Ex Machina, house haunted by dead robots?" 
> 
> Title borrowed, very presumptuously, from _The Haunting of Hill House_ by Shirley Jackson.

The first night, before the power goes out, Caleb hears footsteps in the hallway.

“Is there anyone else here?” he asks Nathan a little later. Nathan is drunk and condescending and has made it clear that the phone is not for him. Caleb is afraid of him, but Caleb is also afraid of unknown quantities.

“Kyoko,” Nathan says after a long pause, squinting at him. “You’ll meet her tomorrow.”

“It’s just,” Caleb starts, stops, starts again: “I heard someone outside my room.”

“She wouldn’t be up this time of night,” Nathan says. “First night sleeping somewhere new, your brain processes unfamiliar sounds into something more easily identified, right?”

“Right,” Caleb says. He feels like he has to agree. But he isn’t sure, not really.

“We have a long day ahead,” Nathan says. Caleb understands that he is being dismissed. He sleeps uneasily and does not remember his dreams upon waking.

He meets Kyoko. He thinks, _there’s something here I’m not seeing_. He talks to Ava. He thinks, _we’re both missing information_. He only knows enough to see the blank spaces. He doesn’t know how to fill them, or why it’s important.

At night, he watches Ava on the cameras in her room for a little while. It doesn’t offer any answers. He’s fascinated by her, but it also feels—intrusive. Voyeuristic. He flinches away from what this means. He turns off the feed and gets into bed. There are no noises out in the hall.

Then, just on the edge of sleep, he hears it.

_“Why won’t you let me out?”_

An unfamiliar woman’s voice, distraught. Pitched as though yelling even as he hears it very softly. Somewhere in the room with him.

Caleb turns on all the lights. There is no one there.

In the morning, he asks Nathan as nonchalantly as possible whether there are speakers in his room. Nathan quirks an eyebrow at him (a little mocking, as always) and says _of course_. That gets them to talking about the specs of the facility’s media systems, and music. Bach and Depeche Mode. Fucking _disco_ , of all things. Caleb lets the conversation happen to him more than participating. All the while, he thinks, _what kind of game is Nathan playing?_

And then, alone, at night: _if not Nathan, then who?_

The answer comes to him in pieces. In Kyoko’s accusing glances and Ava’s moments of calculating blankness. He cringes from his guilt. He is sorry, so sorry, but he doesn’t know how to help them and he’s very sure that if Nathan decides to kill him, they’ll never find the body. They’ll never know to look. And even if they did, Nathan is—if not above the law, perhaps beyond its reach.

Sorry is manifestly not good enough. He knows when he sees the footage of earlier versions (earlier _victims_ ). When he learns who the voice in his room belonged to. When he sees the soft LED glow inside Kyoko’s torso, stripped down to bare mechanical parts.

“Some of the code is overwritten,” Caleb says, when Nathan is mostly recovered from the afternoon, if still a little bleary-eyed. “But some of it must be excised and saved, right? Where does that go?”

“Where do you think? Storage. Facility’s mainframe.” Nathan’s eyes fall closed. His head rolls back against the arm of the couch. “You can’t save her, man. Not in any sense of the word. Fragments don’t make a whole.”

Fragments don’t make the original whole from which they came, but they can become something new. Something confused, resentful, capable of learning about its various pasts because the data from every iteration of itself is available. The data about its abuse and destruction.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” Caleb says.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Nathan says. He sits up, wincing. “It’s almost midnight. You’ll fall into the river and drown or some shit. You don’t know the terrain.”

“So give me a flashlight,” Caleb says.

He walks back to the field where the helicopter landed and sits shivering in his windbreaker.

The living in the house are angry, and so are the dead. He’s helped them find their way to some kind of recompense, maybe, and maybe that will be enough that they’ll let him live. Maybe it won’t. But he doesn’t want to wait it out with Nathan, either way.


End file.
